“It isn’t pretty, is it?” I asked.
“Sara told me the manuscript burned in the fire. I can’t go in there, Alice. I can’t face Mimi.”
“Well, you’re in luck,” I said. “Mimi’s gone.”
“Gone where?”
I shrugged. “Nobody knows.”
“Is that why Frank was so eager to find me?”
“I guess.”
“The way Frank ran out into the street after me today,” he said. “He could have been killed.”
“It’s a wonder he wasn’t,” I said. “You know Frank would follow you anywhere. How could you run from him like that?”
“It wasn’t my fault the kid followed me.”
“Nothing’s ever your fault, is it, Xander?” I said. “You know what? You’re the one we should call Jeopardy. You’re dangerous for Frank to be around. That kid needs a role model, not a partner in crime. You need to grow up, or get lost for good.”
I started up the driveway without him. “Alice, wait,” he said. “Listen. For just a minute, okay?” He grabbed my elbow. “You’re right. I’m too old to be this stupid. I’m going to change. I promise.”
“Prove it,” I said.
“Prove it? How?”
“Tell me what happened to your sister.”
BE INSIDE IN a few, I texted Mr. Vargas. Are you okay with Frank?
More than okay, he replied. Take your time.
“We’re good,” I said, and put my phone away. “Why don’t we sit down someplace?”
Xander marched up the driveway in front of me, eyes averted from the rubble, every line of his body crying out for cigarettes and a blindfold. We sat on the front stoop with our backs against the blue slate entranceway. It was warm from the afternoon slant of sun and we could see all the way to the ocean over the top of the stucco wall.
Xander didn’t linger on details. “My sister and I were in a car accident together,” he said. “I lived. She died. That’s all you need to know.”
“No it isn’t. What was your sister’s name?
“Lisa.”
“Who was driving?”
“I was.”
“How old were you?”
“Twenty. Lisa was fifteen. That day.”
Ah. That would explain I don’t do birthdays. “So how did it happen?”
“I wasn’t drunk,” he said.
“I didn’t say you were.”
“Everybody thought I must have been until I tested clean. My problem wasn’t something you can just sleep off.” Xander put his hands on his thighs and rubbed them back and forth against his jeans, as if he meant to warm them up or wipe them clean of something. “I hate talking about this,” he said.
“Too bad,” I said. “Go on.”
“Okay. Well. We were on the way to the store to buy soda for her birthday party. I thought that would be as good a time as any to give Lisa her present. It was something I’d been practicing all summer in empty parking lots. There’s not a lot to do for fun in a small town in Vermont if you don’t drink or do drugs. I couldn’t play the piano all day, although now I wish I had learned that ridiculous Vangelis piece she was crazy about for her birthday instead.”
“What ridiculous Vangelis piece?” I asked. “Who’s Vangelis?”
“I forget how young you are sometimes,” he said. “You probably weren’t born yet. You couldn’t get away from that song that summer. The one from Chariots of Fire.”
Oh. The piece he’d been trying to get under his belt since forever. “Forget Vangelis,” I said. “I want to know what happened to Lisa.”
“I showed her how to send a car into a three-hundred-sixty-degree skid is what happened. Lisa and I were big fans of trashy action movies with insane car chases. She loved that spin just as much as I thought she would right up to the point where I lost control of the car and it slammed into a tree.”
Xander’s parents never forgave him. The State of Vermont did, after eighteen months of a three-year sentence for criminally negligent homicide. So did Sara, after she was grown. She’d even demonstrated his absolution in her eyes by naming her son Alexander, after him. “But Sara was just a kid when it happened,” he said. “I think she forgave me because she thought I was all the family she’d have left someday. Now that she has a family of her own, I’m sure there are days she wishes I’d never been born. I know her husband feels that way. So I try never to stick around long enough to let her down.”
He’ll only disappoint you.
“If you think you’ll always let people down, that’s all you’ll ever do,” I said.
“You sound like my mother,” he said.
“You’re old enough to be my dad.”
There are worse places for a relationship to die, I guess, than on the front stoop of a glass mansion with a view of the ocean at sunset above its stucco wall. As these things go, it wasn’t even all that painful. Xander and I sat there together for a while, watching the sky go pink. “We used to eat our lunches here,” he said at last. “This was the only place you could still see the water after the wall went up out front.”
“We?”